How Not to Write about Atrocities

The ways that academics discuss Assyrians today were shaped by the fact that one of the most widely cited works in modern Assyrian history was written by an apologist for the Iraqi state’s massacres of Assyrians in 1933 and published by a denier of the Armenian genocide. The assumptions and harmful tropes about Assyrians found in that article have been repeated uncritically in many influential works of history since.Footnote ¹⁰

Khaldun S. Husry was the son of Satiʿ al-Husri, an Arab nationalist intellectual of Syrian origin who was serving as the director general of Iraq’s ministry of education at the time of Khaldun’s birth in 1923, and Jamila al-Husri, a Turkish-born elite related to the Ottoman dynasty. Both Satiʿ and Jamila al-Husri were personally close to the Hashemite royal family and in particular to Iraq’s first king, Faysal I, who had been installed as part of the process of establishing the British mandate over Iraq. Husry married into the family of Rashid ʿAli al-Gaylani in 1950. Gaylani was a former prime minister of Iraq who had led a coup against a British-linked Iraqi government in 1941, during which time he briefly aligned with the Axis powers. Gaylani was then overthrown by a British invasion of Iraq the same year.Footnote ¹¹

Husry pursued graduate-level study in history in his late thirties and through his forties, earning a master’s degree and a PhD from the American University of Beirut (AUB).Footnote ¹² His PhD dissertation, a history of Iraq from 1930 to 1936, was filed in October 1972. As Hana Sleiman has demonstrated, AUB was a primary site where Arab history–making developed between the 1920s and 1950s as a professionalized, scientific discipline under the leadership of Constantine Zurayq and other scholars. In their own self-conception, Arab historians emerged as impartial arbiters of knowledge, excavating and interpreting facts about the past in order to determine the Arab future.Footnote ¹³ The politics intertwined with these new scholarly trends among both faculty and students were strongly influenced by Arab nationalism. Iraqi students had been present at AUB, and had formed a key component of Arab nationalist thought there, since at least the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁴ Beginning in the late 1960s, radical leftist student activists, shaken by the Arab world’s events of 1967 and inspired by the global movements of 1968, roiled the campus with protests. The younger leaders of these movements pulled back somewhat from traditional currents of Arab nationalism more common to Husry’s slightly older generation—for instance, they deprioritized the role of Gamal Abdel Nasser as an Arab leader. Their concerns were simultaneously local, demanding greater influence over affairs on campus; regional, underscoring solidarity with Palestine; and global, protesting the American invasion of Vietnam and other imperialist violence.Footnote ¹⁵

Husry developed his account of the 1933 Assyrian massacres in this milieu. Trained in the new approach developed by AUB historians, Husry emphasizes in his PhD dissertation that he has tried only to ascertain the facts about what happened between 1930 and 1936 in Iraq, differentiating this narrative from his “personal views.”Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, he renders judgments about the agents involved and the causes and effects of historical events—claims that, by design, had direct contemporary applications in Iraqi politics. When writing about what he calls “the Assyrian affair,” Husry situates his history-writing as a critique of colonialism in Iraq, a political stance consistent with both Arab nationalist and anti-imperialist trends in his environment. However, he also employs a heavy-handed empiricist method, relying almost entirely on the content and logic of the British colonial archive. The presumptions he makes about the fundamental truth of this archive’s holdings lead him to muddled, self-contradictory, and racist reasoning. Despite his posturing, some of Husry’s comments on Iraq and the Assyrians evince views at odds with the radical politics of many of his fellow AUB scholars.

Husry’s 1974 IJMES article on “the Assyrian affair,” based on this PhD research, summarizes most of the major occurrences leading to the massacres of Assyrians in 1933 by the Iraqi army and irregular local combatants. In the following retelling of that summary, I have put Husry in conversation with Sargon Donabed, who wrote his account of 1933 as a corrective to the prevailing version of these events, and Mariam Georgis, who uses the analytic of indigeneity to understand the position of Assyrians in Iraq.Footnote ¹⁷ After the independence of the Iraqi state from the British mandate in 1932, longstanding disputes among the state, Kurdish and Arab communities, and Assyrians in Iraq descended into catastrophe. Assyrians were among the minoritized peoples in the new state, along with Kurds, Turkmens, and Yazidis, who were wary of the consequences of the end of the mandate and sought to preserve some kind of independent communal sovereignty, often through nationalist movements. The Assyrians in Iraq, many of whom were survivors of either Seyfo in the Ottoman Empire or the agonizing death march from Urmia in Iran, had faced numerous smaller-scale acts of violence at the hands of Arab and Kurdish neighbors in the years since World War I.Footnote ¹⁸ During the mandate, thousands of the community’s men had been armed as part of British-commanded security forces, the Iraq Levies (which also included several thousand Muslim non-Assyrians), and, in turn, had committed acts of violence against other people in Iraq in that capacity.Footnote ¹⁹ Their search for autonomy also was shaped, of course, by ideas about Assyrian nationhood that had been forming since the nineteenth century. This was the context in which a faction of Assyrians who were loyal to Mar Eshai Shimun (1908–1975), the patriarch of the Church of the East, sought autonomy in northern Iraq—and considered the possibility of achieving this elsewhere, such as in the French mandate of Syria—under the patriarch’s leadership.

Non-Assyrian Iraqis generally regarded Assyrian refugees as a threatening external force in Iraq, a fifth column originating in Turkey and loyal to Britain.Footnote ²⁰ But these Assyrians were moving within lands that their families had traversed for generations and therefore did not see themselves as outsiders within newly drawn colonial boundaries, nor as distinct from Assyrians already living in Iraq.Footnote ²¹ Furthermore, thousands of the British-commanded Iraq Levies had been non-Assyrians, the Arab Iraqi monarchy had been created by Britain, and the predominantly Arab Iraqi military was armed by Britain. In these changed post-mandate circumstances, Assyrian refugees did not assume that they had the backing of the British Empire any longer. Assyrians responded to these new circumstances in different ways. Mar Eshai Shimun and his loyalists, for their part, adopted a strategy of appealing repeatedly to international powers via the League of Nations for assistance in creating and settling an autonomous region.

At one point in late July 1933, a group of armed Assyrian men crossed into French-controlled Syria, then returned to Iraq’s northwestern border, where they faced Iraqi troops. Those armed Assyrians fought a battle with Iraqi troops on August 4 and 5, 1933. Iraqi sources, to which Husry lends credence, claim that the Assyrian combatants mutilated several Iraqi troops whom they had killed in the battle. In retaliation for this reported act, Iraqi general Bakr Sidqi ordered the summary execution of fifteen disarmed Assyrian men who had been brought to him by Kurdish irregulars.Footnote ²² This was the beginning of many summary executions of Assyrian men and attacks on Assyrian villages by Arab and Kurdish Iraqis. Thousands of Assyrians, many of whom had no association with Mar Eshai Shimun or the Church of the East, fled their homes amid killings, kidnappings, sexual violence, and looting. The largest single killing was the massacre of hundreds in Simele, where many displaced Assyrian civilians had taken refuge, on August 11, by a machine-gun detachment of the Iraqi army. By the end of the month, the Iraqi military and irregulars had attacked over 120 villages. British aerial surveillance photographs even show evidence that the Iraqi military, using British-manufactured warplanes and bombs, bombarded some locations from the air.Footnote ²³ The massacre at Simele and the other massacres of Assyrians in 1933 were a shattering blow to people who had already survived a genocide, triggering community-wide fear and grief that has persisted for generations.

The central argument in Husry’s article is that the Iraqi government bore no responsibility for the mass murder of Assyrians. Husry attributes the massacre in Simele exclusively to a lower-level army officer, going so far as to suggest that the officer’s men inadvertently found themselves amid a “melee” in the village that was already in progress.Footnote ²⁴ Husry scarcely mentions the widespread violence against Assyrians in other villages that continued through August 1933. He also downplays the total number of dead.Footnote ²⁵ Having minimized the violence and absolved the Iraqi state of responsibility for any “terrible excesses” that might have happened, he then, in an obvious self-contradiction, closes the article by asserting that those excesses were necessary to save the Iraqi state from dissolution.Footnote ²⁶ As atrocity deniers typically do, Husry characterizes the atrocity he is denying as both insignificant—a sad but minor aberration, not a deliberate crime consistent with systematic violence—and as something that its victims deserved. He bolsters the latter stance by characterizing those victims with bigoted language: Assyrians, collectively, were “swaggering . . . conceited and self-willed”; Mar Eshai Shimun was “obdurate” and “arrogant”; Surma Khanum, the aunt of Mar Eshai Shimun, was a “fanatic.”Footnote ²⁷

Much of Husry’s argument rests on the assumption that the Assyrian perspective is interchangeable with the British colonial one because many Assyrian men had once served in the Iraq Levies; and, correspondingly, that British colonial sources must be expressing views sympathetic to Assyrians. Therefore, he reasons, if British sources are disparaging Assyrians, those comments must be impartial facts that can be repeated without qualification and used as proof of the truth of a pro-Iraqi-state claim. For instance, Husry blames the Assyrians for provoking their own killings because armed Assyrian men started the confrontation with Iraqi troops on the Syrian border, presenting the British colonial account of the episode as the definitive verification that it must have happened that way.Footnote ²⁸ He approvingly repeats British military officer R. S. Stafford’s characterization of Assyrians as having a “natural conceit . . . [that] has no bounds,” claiming that Stafford’s writing gives accurate insight into Assyrian “psychology.” Astonishingly, Husry characterizes Stafford as a pro-Assyrian source.Footnote ²⁹ He maintains this stance even while writing about British military support for the Iraqi violence and about how British complicity in brutalizing Assyrians was controversial in Britain.Footnote ³⁰

Many other egregious examples of poor reasoning permeate the text. For instance, Husry compares the Simele violence to the then-recent massacre committed by American troops at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 by way of arguing that such events are tragic but normal. Husry—who almost certainly witnessed protests on the AUB campus of this very atrocity after it became public knowledge in 1969—dismissively writes, “the world has sadly learned since 1933 that My-Lais occur in modern wars.” He then affectionately recalls how, as a child in 1933, he had celebrated the Iraqi soldiers who had carried out the “operations” when they returned to Baghdad by showering them with freshly picked flowers from his family’s garden.Footnote ³¹ (An American diplomat at the time reported that an Assyrian man, a former officer of the dissolved Iraq Levies, was lynched in Baghdad amid this victory parade.Footnote ³²) Husry, in other words, defends imperial violence despite positioning the article as an anticolonial critique.

Husry’s IJMES article was unusually long by an academic journal’s standards—around 18,000 words including notes, such that the journal had to publish it in two parts across two issues in an era when it was constrained by the limitations of print. IJMES was, at the time, a new journal that had been conceived and inaugurated as part of the establishment of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1966. Its founding editor was Stanford Shaw, a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey at the University of California, Los Angeles. The journal’s first issue (volume 1, no. 1) was published in January 1970.Footnote ³³ The first half of Husry’s article appeared in volume 5, no. 2, and the second half appeared in the next issue (no. 3) of the same volume.

The article’s length indicates that Husry did not initially write it for the journal and did not significantly modify it from its original form for publication. The article that appeared in IJMES in early 1974 is, in fact, almost identical to the fourth chapter of the dissertation that Husry filed at AUB in late 1972. There is only one meaningful difference between the two texts: the dissertation chapter includes a short paragraph describing a few of the particularly cruel acts that Iraqi troops committed against women and a child in Simele, but this paragraph does not appear in the IJMES article.Footnote ³⁴ The other differences are, for the most part, very small omissions of the dissertation text (not enough to substantially reduce the word count), corrections of typos, or minor changes to the wording and grammar to bring the original text in line with IJMES style. Even some phrasings like “as we shall later see,” referring to content upcoming in later chapters in the dissertation (which, of course, are not in the journal), were not caught in edits and appear in the IJMES article.Footnote ³⁵ It is difficult to determine with certainty what kind of editorial process the article was subjected to, including whether it went through blind peer review, a new practice at the time.Footnote ³⁶ Nevertheless, the close similarity and completion timing of the two texts indicates that Husry mailed a mostly or entirely unmodified typescript of the chapter from Beirut to Los Angeles for review soon after completing it and that it was accepted for publication with minimal edits and without substantial corrections or revisions.

In an editorial essay introducing volume 5, no. 2, Shaw explains that his selection of articles for the issue reflected his views of the benefits and costs of the Ottoman Empire’s “millet system” for managing “various ethnic, social, and religious groups.” He writes:

To contextualize Husry’s article along with the others in the issue, Shaw then expounds at length on what he sees as the primary cause of that “mutual scorn”—European imperial intervention, which, he says, non-Muslims welcomed. He argues that this influence also spurred non-Muslims’ identity formation as communities antagonistic to Muslims, leading tragically to back-and-forth violence:

Conspicuously, Shaw’s periodization of 1890 to 1920 for the time of tumultuous mutual violence includes the Hamidian massacres, the Armenian genocide, and Seyfo.

The claims Shaw makes in his editorial note are familiar from the historiography of the Ottoman Empire. At the time, the theory of a “declining” Ottoman state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was common. So was the assumption that the Ottoman state was adept at managing difference, and the accompanying claim that any violence that occurred in the empire must have been a result of minoritarian bigotry or foreign meddling. In particular, Shaw’s coauthored book with his spouse Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, volume 2, published in 1977, is notorious for justifying the pre–World War I massacres of Armenians and denying the Ottomans’ World War I genocides. In their work, the Shaws minimized the number of Armenian dead through dubious interpretations of population statistics; blamed the mass killings on the fact that Armenian militias sided with Russia in the war; and suggested that the Ottoman Empire’s brutalized and displaced indigenous Christian communities in fact held power over the Muslim majority because of imperial intervention.Footnote ³⁹

Stanford Shaw’s editorial note for the IJMES issue in which he chose to place Husry’s article therefore frames the articles within it as contiguous with his own then-ongoing revisionist scholarship. Shaw’s promotion of Husry’s article on the Assyrians was not merely linked to his more infamous denial of the Armenian genocide—it was a preview of the same line of reasoning. Most strikingly, in their 1977 book, the Shaws ended up using identical terminology to that in Stanford Shaw’s 1974 essay introducing Husry’s work—“massacre and counter massacre”—to obfuscate intention and responsibility for the annihilation of Armenians.Footnote ⁴⁰ Furthermore, the preliminary sketch of Shaw’s genocide denial theory, evident in his framing of Husry’s article, is predicated on the idea that Europeans “encouraged” the distinct “identification” of native minoritized Christians.Footnote ⁴¹ The latter idea is central not only to denial of the Armenian genocide, but also to the denial of Assyrian peoplehood outside of the context of nineteenth-century nationalism. I will address this point in the next section of the present article.

Shaw also identifies in his editorial note what he believes to be a crucial contrast: the treacherous Christians who sided with the imperialists, like the Assyrians discussed by Husry, versus the assimilated Arab Christians who adopted anticolonial ideologies alongside their Muslim compatriots. He writes approvingly that one of the articles in the issue, Donald M. Reid’s “The Syrian Christians and Early Socialism in the Arab World,” which appears immediately after Husry’s, is about the latter, more admirable group of Christians:

In an interview, Reid told me that he had submitted “Syrian Christians” to IJMES in 1970 alongside another article and that both articles were accepted at that time, but that the journal held “Syrian Christians” for a few years prior to publication. Reid does not own a copy of the full issue and therefore did not know until I told him in 2022 that his article had been published back-to-back with Husry’s in this manner. When I read the relevant portions of Shaw’s editorial essay aloud to him, Reid reacted with surprise and described it as “a pretty loaded interpretation” of his work.Footnote ⁴³

It is Husry’s article—written by the scion of a prominent and wealthy family close to the Iraqi establishment, packed full of racist calumny, self-contradiction, and faulty reasoning, and published under the auspices of a well-known genocide denier who promoted the article as coterminous with his revisionist stance—that all too often serves as the basis of accounts of the events of 1933 in Iraq. Even recent scholarship that includes endnotes referring to responsibly written histories of Assyrians nevertheless reproduces many of Husry’s principal claims without so much as mentioning that massacres of Assyrians occurred in places other than Simele, as though the more credible sources cited were not actually read.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, in some cases, this barely edited PhD dissertation chapter from the early 1970s is one of the only works primarily about Assyrians cited at all in books about Iraq by nonspecialists.Footnote ⁴⁵

The consequences of this choice are evident throughout the historiography that relies on Husry. Multiple histories of Iraq published by academic presses repeat verbatim Husry’s characterization of the Assyrians as “swaggering,” for example, without any critical distance or quotation marks.Footnote ⁴⁶ They also repeat without qualification Husry’s description of Assyrians as foreigners in Iraq, disregarding the Assyrians who already lived in Iraq.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like Husry, they conflate the movements of armed men with the movements of the entire community of refugees, using language that suggests that the migrants were inherently threatening and suspect.Footnote ⁴⁸ They follow his lead of neglecting to mention that the Assyrians in Iraq who were refugees were survivors of a genocide—a genocide that, for decades, was widely denied in the Ottomanist literature. This omission occurs even in works published long after the Ottoman studies field largely came to recognize the genocide.Footnote ⁴⁹

These reiterations of Husry’s main points have continued into the present despite the development in recent years of a robust body of scholarship on Assyrians in modern Iraq that calls those points into question. To some extent, the persistence of Husry’s influence is a familiar problem found in many other cases of repeated scholarly error—a self-perpetuating citational habit promoted by nonspecialists who continue to refer to a widely cited text because they infer from its ubiquity that it is probably the most important work on a certain topic. But benign mistakes are not the only explanation for this problem. I know from personal experience that many of my colleagues deliberately disregard, and even disdain, Assyrian perspectives. Their behavior is no surprise; after all, most of the works they read and cite from major journals and university presses over the course of their careers treat Assyrians as deluded chauvinists whose very origins are so suspect that they should be repeatedly challenged.

How Not to Critique Ethnic Nationalism

To understand the shoddy academic treatment of the 1933 Assyrian massacres in Iraq, it is necessary to examine the attacks on Assyrians and basic aspects of their existence that retain purchase in scholarly literature. That phenomenon, in turn, will not make sense if the reader is not aware from the outset that it is interlaced with pervasive interpersonal hostility toward Assyrians in academia, particularly in Middle East studies. The mundane combativeness faced by Assyrian scholars and students has seldom been documented and exposed because it is difficult and professionally risky to do so. These risks are compounded by the precarious status of most Assyrian academics. The majority of Assyrians producing academic knowledge are graduate students, contingent researchers, untenured faculty, or independent writers and activists who have to maintain cordial relations with those within the academy (especially the Anglophone academy) to publish and present their work in peer-reviewed venues.

As a tenured professor, I am an exception to the rule and can speak more freely on this topic. There have been innumerable instances over the course of my career in which a colleague has, in a professional setting, responded with unease, contempt, or mockery when I simply use the word Assyrian to describe myself. Often, they then try to convince me that being Assyrian is not a real thing, and that describing myself that way makes me a nationalist or a bigot. On one memorable occasion, a distinguished senior professor of Arabic literature fought me for several minutes, forcefully maintaining that I am an Arab (even though nobody in my family lived in an Arabophone region or spoke Arabic with native fluency until my parents’ generation) and that calling myself Assyrian was “Islamophobic.” Every time I relate these stories to fellow Assyrians who have studied or worked in higher education, from college students to fellow faculty, I hear similar stories from them in return.

Helpfully, one historian, Adam Becker, documented in an academic article an instance in which he badgered an Assyrian colleague in this manner, describing the term Assyrian as “hogwash.” Becker’s admission—rare among the academics who engage in this behavior—permits a closer look at the practice from the view of the perpetrator. In his telling, while traveling in Turkey, Becker encountered a fellow visitor from Boston named Sargon. He was initially pleased to be able to speak English after days of speaking a “pigeon [sic] English-Turkish” with the locals. Then, he proceeded to have a “friendly but persistent disagreement” with Sargon. The disagreement was over whether Sargon’s self-description as “Assyrian” was more accurate than if he called himself, as Becker prefers, “East Syrian,” “Nestorian,” or “Syriac Christian.” Becker then describes himself as a historian critical of nationalisms in the tradition of Benedict Anderson or Eric Hobsbawm, contrasting himself with Sargon. In a footnote, Becker identifies his interlocutor as Sargon Donabed, who was a graduate student at the time.Footnote ⁵⁰

Becker’s interpersonal behavior is key to understanding his argument in the article, which reflects widespread patterns in the literature when discussing modern Assyrians. After remarking smugly that “clearly some modern Assyrians feel threatened” because people like him are examining their history, he writes:

Notably, Becker acknowledges that there have long been endonyms in Neo-Aramaic that can reasonably be understood as linked to the term “Assyrian”—well before the existence of the concepts of ethnicity or nationalism. That is, these endonyms are not dishonest fabrications. Of course, the same continuity of terminology (however partial and variable it may be) is found among many other groups that have since adopted a particular modern notion of themselves. Becker even admits in the article’s closing that his own preferred term, Syriac, is “ironically . . . a modern, Western term only taken up of late by some parts of the ‘Syriac’ community” (quotation marks in the original).Footnote ⁵²

Becker also positions himself as a moderate in the debate over Assyrian origins, adding nuance to the common thesis that Assyrians first came into existence when American and European missionaries forged that appellation based on the name of an ancient empire and then applied it to some tribes of Christians they came across in the Ottoman Empire and Iran in the nineteenth century. The proponents of the maximal form of this thesis describe the term Assyrian as “false” or even as orientalist propaganda.Footnote ⁵³ In her well-known book on Assyrians in London, Madawi al-Rasheed supports the missionary fabrication thesis at length but shows more sympathy for the missionaries, explaining that the Assyrians exhibited “poverty, ignorance and backwardness” and that the Anglican mission “was above all a humanitarian and educational enterprise the purpose of which was to ameliorate their life conditions.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As established above, the idea that colonizers were the primary force behind the identity of Assyrians and other minoritized indigenous non-Muslims in the Muslim world also is favored by deniers of the Armenian genocide and Seyfo because it allows them to attribute violence against Christians in the Ottoman Empire to imperial meddling.Footnote ⁵⁵

There is no reason to believe that Becker or al-Rasheed are genocide deniers like Stanford Shaw. So why, having established that Assyrian self-identification is not a propagandistic fiction or a delusion planted in the minds of backward oriental Christians by missionaries, does Becker proceed with a “compromise position” on Assyrian origins? Why should someone inserting himself uninvited into Assyrians’ conversations have any say whatsoever in setting the standard for what “make[s] them” Assyrian? Why does he dismiss anyone displeased with his engagement in the debate on Assyrian origins, and his insistence that Assyrians could only have come into existence “vis-à-vis an Occidental Other,” as an “Assyrian nationalist”? Why does this debate, which smacks of colonial race science, still exist?

It is alarming how often Middle East studies professors cannot resist pulling out their calipers when they encounter Assyrians. Michael Gunter writes, when first introducing who Assyrians are, that they “claim descent from the ancient Assyrian Empire . . . [but] a substantial proportion of the Assyrians probably come from the same racial stock as their Muslim neighbors” (emphasis added). This assertion appeared in a book published by an academic imprint not in the heyday of eugenics, but in 2011.Footnote ⁵⁶ Preeminent works of Iraqi history routinely open any discussion of Assyrians by noting that they are “Nestorians” who “claim descent from the ancient Assyrians.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Nestorianism is a theological position; not all Nestorians are Assyrians, and not all Assyrians are Nestorians. The most recent major survey of modern Iraqi history in English, written by Johan Franzén and published by Oxford University Press in 2021, opens a discussion of Assyrians by calling them “an unusual ethnic group . . . claiming descent from the ancient Akkadian kingdom of Assur.”Footnote ⁵⁸ I have not yet located an example of these authors introducing any other ethnic or national group—including those with elaborate nationalist myth complexes—with similar language.

Ironically, the scholars who introduce speculation about Assyrians’ racial origins the moment they mention them are following in the tradition of the nineteenth-century missionaries whose colonial activities they believe they are questioning by using this language. In 1841, American physician Asahel Grant used the race science he had learned in his medical training to hypothesize that the Assyrians he was proselytizing to in Urmia were descended from the “Lost Tribes of Israel” because “the physiognomy of the Nestorian Christians bears a close resemblance to that of the Jews of the country in which they dwell.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1850, Anglican missionary J. P. Fletcher claimed, based on his physical observations, that the “modern inhabitants of the plain of Nineveh” shared “strong features of affinity” with “sculptural representations of the ancient Assyrians.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Works like Grant’s and Fletcher’s have now spawned two centuries’ worth of racist speculation about Assyrians at a frequency that is not found in recent work on dominant ethnic and national groups in modern Middle East studies, where such arguments, although once common, have largely been discredited.Footnote ⁶¹ Other modern communities in the region that exhibit some kind of linguistic or geographical continuity with well-known ancient peoples also have been put through this kind of pathologizing scrutiny. Notably, modern Greeks were subject to stereotypes and questions about their origins, similar to those aimed at modern Assyrians, in works by twentieth-century classicists and historians of the Byzantine Empire as late as the 1960s. As Maria Mavroudi has documented, some of these works are still in print and regularly reissued.Footnote ⁶² The bigoted treatment of Assyrians is unusually persistent, however, and continues to appear in newly written literature.

But today, rather than trying to prove that Assyrians have an unchanged ancient “physiognomy,” racist scholars usually argue the opposite: that a group of people who speak and express a distinct indigenous language and culture are wrong to claim that distinction, and should be limited to describing themselves with terms like Nestorian that refer to only some of their ancestors’ theological positions, because any ancient bloodlines they might be descended from are too diluted to permit them to have any other kind of communal identity. For instance, J. F. Coakley argues that even though “the name ‘Assyria’ was remembered from ancient times,” along with the appellation Assyrian, and “continued to be applied” in Syriac and Neo-Aramaic to people and places in northern Mesopotamia, the fact that people using those terms are not “the actual descendants of the ancient Assyrians” makes their communal identity a “bogus ethnology.”Footnote ⁶³ This position may appear at first glance to be more progressive than Grant’s and Fletcher’s, but it is equally rooted in discredited race science.

Many Assyrians, including me, find arguments about bloodlines and “racial stock” harmful and avoid them. But some other Assyrians have accepted their premises and engaged in them, enthusiastically seeking ways to prove that they are, in fact, direct descendants of ancient imperialists, sometimes to embarrassing effect. The recent embrace of race science among some Assyrians is reciprocal to the relentless imposition of a racist standard on them by academics. If calling themselves Assyrian and living in a place they call Assyria (or variants thereof) for centuries does not really “make them” Assyrian to their critics, they reason, maybe comparing their physical attributes to those of ancient Assyrian kings will do so.Footnote ⁶⁴ Furthermore, this tendency is hardly unique to Assyrians, as the popularity of commercial DNA testing in the United States and its attendant questionable ideas about race, ethnicity, and descent from royalty amply demonstrate.Footnote ⁶⁵

Race science and myth complexes of magnificent lineage are common to many nationalisms. This is also true of the territorial nationalisms within the states Assyrians inhabit as a transnational indigenous community, such as Iraqi nationalism and Iranian nationalism. Consider the common insistence on referring to Assyrians as “Iraqi Christians,” revealing the assumption that the term Iraqi, though equally associated with a potentially chauvinistic form of nationalism (and unquestionably a modern construction), is more objective than the term Assyrian and needs no avoidance or modification.Footnote ⁶⁶ In other words, critical scholars today do not usually use the existence of problematic claims of origin to induce speculation about other groups’ racial origins routinely before proceeding to other lines of scholarly inquiry. They also do not habitually use this fact to insist on creating new terms for people because they belong to a community whose members make such claims about their ancestry.

The exceptional pathologizing of Assyrian identity formation, then, is central to the disparagement of Assyrians in modern Middle East historiography. Although the literature on the meanings and origins of ethnicity and nationalism is voluminous and often contentious, there is a broad consensus around some points. For instance, scholars accept that ethnicity and nationalism are modern concepts, and that they prioritize a complex of shared attributes among a wide range of people who do not know each other, superseding smaller-scale ties like kinship and locality. Correspondingly, it makes sense to observe that Assyrians, like other people, did not consider themselves an ethnic group or a nation, and did not consistently prioritize the idea of being Assyrian over other ties, until the nineteenth century. It is also reasonable to examine changes in the meanings of terms that we now translate as “Assyrian,” the vexing problems Assyrians have faced with self- and communal appellation, and the impact of colonial encounters and state-building on Assyrian communities. Assyrian scholars themselves have examined these and many other issues.Footnote ⁶⁷

But Middle East studies scholars too often insist on excluding Assyrians from the assumption that they participated in the transformations of modernity the same way their neighbors did. They instead assert that there is something “unusual” (in Johan Franzén’s wording) about how they came to be. If Assyrians’ immediate ancestors were more likely to self-identify as Christian than as Assyrian in the early modern era, that is consistent with known patterns—so why does J. F. Coakley lament that Assyrians’ current self-appellation is “unfortunate”?Footnote ⁶⁸ Concepts like ethnicity and nationalism are known to form in response to shifting material conditions.Footnote ⁶⁹ A historical analysis cannot be rigorous, or even basically sound, if it proceeds from the assumption that evolutions and discontinuities are abnormal.

Equally puzzling is Madawi al-Rasheed’s 1990s ethnographic work on Assyrians, which continues to be cited as standard scholarship. Her book, a work of social science that aims to draw broader conclusions about ethnicity as a social construction, is built on the premise that Assyrian ethnic formation is abnormal. She argues, from an evidentiary base of interviews with twenty Assyrian families in London in the 1990s, that the development of Assyrian national consciousness a century prior did not follow the patterns identified by Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner in association with print culture and capitalism because it was imposed by an array of outside forces, especially missionaries and British mandate authorities in Iraq.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is even more difficult to take this thesis seriously after reading al-Rasheed’s admission in her book’s introduction that, at the outset of her research, she was surprised to learn that there were self-identified Assyrians in Iraq and that they had been there prior to the 1991 Gulf War. She had initially assumed the Assyrian appellation was a local diasporic reaction in London to the recent demonization of Iraqis in the Western press.Footnote ⁷¹ We repeatedly find ourselves justifying our peoplehood to academics who maintain that Assyrians are some kind of malformation, but who keep revealing from the outset that they do not know what they are talking about.

Adam Becker, too, wrote a book on the roots of Assyrian nationalism, some years after his article about his “compromise position” on Assyrian origins. By the time that book, Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism, was published in 2015, Becker was less indebted to Anderson and Hobsbawm than to Talal Asad’s ideas of “the secular.” In Asad’s conception, modern secular formations associated with colonialism, like nonreligious nationalisms, are not necessarily distinct from the sacred, especially when they develop in settings in which the concept of religion “has not yet been formulated within the discursive processes of secular modernity.”Footnote ⁷² Relying on Asad, Becker constructs an argument about how American Christian missionaries, through a religious mission, “stimulated” racialized secular nationalism among the “East Syrians” in Iran whom they aimed to influence and transform.Footnote ⁷³ Notably, Asad endorsed Becker’s book, describing it as an excellent study of how “the American Protestant project of moral and religious reform helped to stimulate the development of ‘Assyrian’ national consciousness”—placing the word Assyrian in scare quotes.Footnote ⁷⁴ In his own scholarship, Asad does not, for example, put the word Arab in scare quotes when discussing the formation of Arab national consciousness.Footnote ⁷⁵

To be clear: Becker’s approach is more sophisticated than those of Coakley or al-Rasheed. His conceptualization of how Christian missionaries shaped secular nationalism could, if presented somewhat differently, be a substantive addition to the literature on global missionary history. The book also offers a thorough examination of seldom studied Neo-Aramaic periodicals that are linguistically difficult to contextualize and interpret. Unfortunately, Becker’s lack of expertise in modern Assyrian history leads him to some basic factual errors, as documented by Eden Naby in a self-published review.Footnote ⁷⁶ But there are larger problems. In the book, Becker briefly considers the possibility that “East Syrians” may have been influenced by other forms of ethnic and national formation that were “in the air” around them at the time. Such ideologies presumably include Armenian, Kurdish, and Arab ethnicities and nationalisms, as well as the nation–state citizenship ideologies of Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire, although these ideologies only come up in passing (if at all) throughout the book. Becker then dispenses with the notion that Assyrian identity formation could have occurred in association with these other ideologies as a “vague” one without directly engaging with any work on the subject.Footnote ⁷⁷

Regardless of the subtler language Becker introduces into his work via Asad, he maintains as he did in his previous article that Assyrian nationalism is the constitutive bond of Assyrian communal identification—that there is, essentially, no substantial way of being Assyrian aside from the nationalist one—and that this bond was forged primarily in the nineteenth-century colonial encounter. Any record of the use of terms like Assyrian and Assyria prior to this encounter, or outside its immediate influence, is, he insists, an aberration from the historical norm.Footnote ⁷⁸ And any use of these terms after the colonial encounter must be, through a neat loop of question-begging, a nationalist exercise in colonial-style race science.Footnote ⁷⁹ Becker frequently accompanies these tendentious claims with disrespectful asides, as when he quips about Assyrians who dress up in costumes for vernal equinox celebrations.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Assyrian festival he is referring to, Kha b’Nisan, has often been banned by repressive governments in Assyrians’ places of origin, and Assyrians who wear ostentatious clothes in public to celebrate it are doing so as an act of political resistance.Footnote ⁸¹ Becker’s approach and tone betray the insincerity of his repeated reassurances that he has “no need to squabble about the foundations of Assyrian identity”—especially when, in a previous academic publication, he boasted about starting such a squabble with an Assyrian graduate student of his own accord.Footnote ⁸²

As Hussein Omar observes when discussing the adoption of the identification of “minority” among Egyptian Copts, “If the minority discourse was indeed foreign in origin, naming it as such, I argue, will not, and did not resolve the issue that gave rise to its plausibility in the first place.”Footnote ⁸³ Omar further contends that theories like Asad’s have been used condescendingly to assert that such groups today, when asserting their rights, “inadvertently perpetuate the imperial objectives” of their forbears who were influenced by colonial actors.Footnote ⁸⁴ Peoples like Copts and Assyrians, through this reasoning, are inherently suspect from an anti-imperialist academic perspective. Becker’s book is a prime example of scholarship that adopts and adapts Asad’s approach with all the baggage of contemptuousness that the theory carries. Doing this is a choice.

Others have made different choices. Mana Kia, for instance, has studied the prenationalist logic of Persianate peoplehood in West and South Asia that relied on notions of linguistic community and lineage through conduct. This logic was not necessarily linked to modern ethnicity or racialization, opening up new research questions for scholars studying premodern communal formations.Footnote ⁸⁵ With regard to Assyrians, Michael Sims has written about Assyrian nationalism as a contingent development of the nineteenth century while taking local and regional politics seriously—like changes in the Ottoman Empire and the formation of other ethnic nationalisms—and avoiding the kind of speculation about origins that so frequently gives way to race science.Footnote ⁸⁶ Alda Benjamen has extensively documented numerous forms of Assyrian mobilization in the twentieth century, steering clear of approaches that presume from the outset that Assyrian politics took the form of a separatist nationalism. In doing so, she reveals the many ways that Assyrians have negotiated with neighboring communities and the states they live in.Footnote ⁸⁷

A good critique of ethnic nationalism is one that is conscious of the political work of knowledge production. Conceptualizing ethnicity and nationalism as modern formations forged in particular contexts allows us to view them as processes contingent on recent circumstances rather than as primordial categories. This understanding opens the possibility of modifying those concepts—or, where necessary, abandoning them for new ways of being in community—to end violence perpetrated along ethnic and national fault lines. The critical study of ethnicity and nationalism should, in other words, aim to help dispossessed people live freely. It must account for differences in power between dominant, oppressive ethnic nationalisms that undergird state-sponsored mass violence and the communal mobilizations of those resisting elimination. It is not a bludgeon to coerce minoritized people to adopt state-endorsed descriptors like “Iraqi Christian” that erase their language and heritage because their own peoplehood is allegedly bigoted. It is not a game in which academics prove how clever they are by locating discontinuities among the ancestors of genocide survivors to win squabbles they choose to pick with those they baselessly deride as nationalists. That is not what Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm did, and it is not what anyone citing them today should do. That is an amoral and intellectually vapid exercise.